Nepal journalist's killers sentenced to life

New York, June 6, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomed the life
imprisonment of the two men who murdered journalist Birendra Shah. CPJ also
calls for the arrest of three local Maoists accused of masterminding the 2007
killing.

A judge in the central Bara district sentenced Mainejar Giri
and Ram Ekwal Sahini to life terms and confiscated their property on May 30,
according to local news reports. The two abducted and killed Shah, a local
correspondent for the Nepal FM radio station, Dristi Weekly, and Avenues TV, on October 4, 2007.

Maoist leaders have said
publicly that renegade party member Lal Bahadur Chaudhary, and two associates
named in local news reports as Kundan Faujdar and Hare Ram Patel are
responsible for the crime, according to CPJ research. The
three remain suspects but have not been arrested. Before his kidnapping, Shah
had written critically about local Maoists.

"We are reassured by the life sentences for the two men who
killed Birendra Shah," said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney. "The
masterminds, however, remain at large: Maoist leaders must cooperate with
police to ensure that justice is achieved, with the arrest and prosecution of
the remaining suspects."

Nepal's former rebel Maoists joined the interim government
in 2007 following a decade-long insurgency which culminated in deposing Nepal's
monarch. The former insurgents now hold the majority in a ruling coalition
called the Unified Communist Party of Nepal, which is Maoist. Both sides of the
conflict committed abuses against press freedom during the civil war but
promised to respect freedom of expression after the peace agreement.

Yet many atrocities committed during the war remain
uninvestigated, and attacks on journalists continue with impunity: The
masterminds behind Shah's killing are just one piece of this bloody puzzle.
Maoist supporters have been implicated in many, including the 2008 murder
of Janadisha editor and
Maoist activist J.P. Joshi, who reported on local party disputes, and the
January 2009 slaying of Uma Singh, who had documented Maoist land seizures. Nepal
placed seventh on CPJ's 2011 Impunity
Index, published Wednesday, which lists countries where governments
regularly fail to solve journalist murders.

Leadership disputes among the coalition members have reduced
Nepal's
political process to a near-stalemate. Lawmakers failed to meet a deadline to
draft a new constitution for the second year running in May, according to
international news reports.